Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday March 18, 2016 @06:44PM
from the forgetting-to-learn dept.

An anonymous reader writes from an article on MedicalXpress: They say that once you've learned to ride a bicycle, you never forget how to do it. But new research suggests that while learning, the brain is actively trying to forget. "This is the first time that a pathway in the brain has been linked to forgetting, to actively erasing memories," says Cornelius Gross, who led the work at EMBL. At the simplest level, learning involves making associations, and remembering them. Working with mice, Gross and colleagues studied the hippocampus, a region of the brain that's long been know to help form memories. Information enters this part of the brain through three different routes. As memories are cemented, connections between neurons along the 'main' router become stronger. When they blocked this main route, the scientists found that the mice were no longer capable of learning a Pavlovian response -- associating a sound to a consequence, and anticipating that consequence. But if the mice had learned that association before the scientists stopped information flow in that main route, they could still retrieve that memory. This confirmed that this route is involved in forming memories, but isn't essential for recalling those memories. The latter probably involves the second route into the hippocampus, the scientists surmise. But blocking that main route had an unexpected consequence: the connections along it were weakened, meaning the memory was being erased.

This type of research has also shown that the act of remembering can can memory loss/corruption if the memory isn't stored correctly after recall. This failure can become a feature with certain drugs and facing your fears. Afterward, your phobia free. Interesting stuff.

I am not a neuroscientist, but given what we know about artificial neural networks, it seems to me that forgetting has to be a necessary part of the learning process - allowing neural pathways to be reconfigured to whatever you are learning.We know with artificial neural networks, that training towards one goal necessarily comes at the expense of other goals - and for a given network, the more different patterns it has to be able to recognize, the harder the training is and the more error prone the recognit

TFT (title) says mice forget as they learn, but TFS makes no mention of this, simply saying that if the main memory pathway is blocked by researchers, then it doesn't get stronger and learning cannot occur. Instead the memory pathway (which is not being activated during recall) weakens. How does this mean that forgetting is happening during learning? TFS literally says the opposite.